Been writing some code

[IceDreamer]

Hiding precise rating from everyone but yourself, (although perhaps a "personal best" number could be globally visible).
Making what other people see more generic, like "Player X is Bronze rank" or something similar.
Making the auto-balance options in lobby better to compensate for this lack of precision.

FAF is going to do all of these, as discussed last month during developer conferences.

Balance
I see balance right now as an unhappy middle ground between people who want more changes, faster; and people who think we're already making changes too quickly, causing bad decisions to creep in.

I want to try splitting the main balance into two mods, the first for people who prefer slower change, and the second for those who really want to push the limits of FA.

In the first mod there would be a very deliberate and slow process for making changes; with each change designed to incrementally affect the meta.
In the second mod we'd be adding in cool new stuff like nomads, blackops units (where possible), with each change designed to push the possible without imbalancing factions. (There's a big difference between balancing factions, and balancing the game)

Historically I would see myself falling into the first camp, but I've also loved getting involved in things like the nomads mod in the past too. Lets recognise that different people want different things.

This will splinter your splinter. Lovely and all-round friendly in theory, but it won't work out so well. FA doesn't have the playerbase to sustain anything close to this. Stick to mods. It's what they're for.


Overall I think this a bad plan with a slim-to-nothing chance of success. There are now two clients moving forward at good speed, game development is running smoothly, the new balance team are seriously stepping up the mark when it comes to feedback and changes, and ICE connectivity is getting better by the day. You wanna do Python? Come help Duk3. You wanna do Java? Come help Downlord. You wanna do lua? Come help me

[biass]

I just came back to say "No problem" and then to agree with blackheart

People are scared that this will kill FAF? do they not know they cannot compete? "its just one guy, right?"

Softly if anything i would suggest you make your client focused towards adults and not for children too

[Aulex]

I just came back to say "No problem" and then to agree with blackheart

People are scared that this will kill FAF? do they not know they cannot compete? "its just one guy, right?"

Softly if anything i would suggest you make your client focused towards adults and not for children too

I don't think anyone is scared for a few reasons.

1st, From the "insider" group of people, mostly referring to downlord's comment which I agree with, I don't think Softly has the technical capability to pull this off in an appealing and useable manner for users, himself and anyone who wants to help him.

2nd, He's competing with a huge codebase, even if he did have the skills, it would take him a long time to catch up. For example, downlord has shown he's capable of pumping out a competitive client, but it took a while to reach feature parody with the existing client, some of these features were blocked by issues not controllable by him, but even without these barriers downlord had the head start of building off an existing server, a luxury Softly doesn't have.

3rd, Even if he is able to build the client, server and the surrounding systems needed to run it, from what I read from the original post it will be run like a zepilot style community, which can pump out features quickly, but it isn't maintainable and generally not appealing for new developers making it very difficult for him.

4th, kind of tying the 2nd and 1st point together, he estimates he can release chatting, playing, rating and matchmaker in 3 months. If he worked on this as a day job or spent literally all his free time with it, he could probably get it up, but unless Softly is driven enough and willing to improve himself technically I really don't see this happening.

Generally though, I feel that this attempt at a pivot from the existing system doesn't really make any sense. All the code is open source and he can work on literally anything he wants to. So what I think he really wants is feature flags and allowing to test new things with a specific set of users, well why not just implement it if he's willing to go out of his way to reimplement an already working system? It's a common concept found in industry software. Overall though, Softly can do what he wants, if he wants to try make his own server and client go for it, but I'm just warning anyone who is hoping for success to not get your hopes up.

[Morax]

Softly,

On a serious note, I really do enjoy your enthusiasm and wish you the best, but there are few things about the game I think you could fix that would appeal to me.

Those "things" include the following:

1) Connection stability and pace (game sim speed): Although there are perhaps some optimizations that could be done to improve sim speed and connection stability, we will more than anything depend on a person's PC and their internet choice than anything. You can't code people to get better PCs nor better internet as far as I know until we are all converted to machines

2) Maps: Unless a new editor is developed that makes the process much MUCH more easy I don't think we will ever see any high-quality maps made for us to play. I have been trying to make a map in my limited spare time which has lead to me learning how to dodge editor crashes and bugs more than anything. Granted I'm having a lot more trouble than the norm, not many people are willing to put up with learning it like myself and others. The map vault is getting kind of dry with content and many players are not really willing to learn new ones like Tokyto's phenomenal "Funeral Plains." The community has so many Gap, Thermopylae, etc type players it's kind of a loss to try and improve here. You would have to somehow improve the taste in game-style of the population for me to feel your option would be better here.

3) Competitive players: How do you plan to get more people to join than FAF? Advertisement and promotion plans? Where is the $ for this? We need real $ to get things to the next level and unfortunately the one person who has that $ is tired of the community/project.

I wish you well and all but I don't know if we can really do much other than keep FAF alive and hope some game studio notices to pick it up or design a game like it for the modern age.

Until then, I hope we can all stick together and support what we have, which is a lot.

[Softly]

...

...

Not included the whole quotes, but thanks for all the feedback.

To respond to IceDreamer: There's plenty of great things in FAF dev right now, but there are weaknesses too which I don't want to derail the thread with. As I mentioned previously, I am actively wishing FAF the best in everything it wants to achieve, even if I don't want to be a big part of that journey.

Aulex; if I understand correctly your main point is that it will take too long to go from scratch to being FAF feature complete, based on your assessment of my technical skills.

While I agree this is surely a big task, I think we need to avoid falling into some traps:

a) That we need to replicate FAF - I'm absolutely not tied to doing this. Where appropriate I am more than happy to ignore features that FAF has if I think the coding time is too long, or the benefit too small.
b) That somehow the number of lines of code (or other similar measures) are what matters. There is precedent for "hackers" coming up with a FA community; one such person was called Zep. That is evidence that the work required is reasonable for me to get started on, and involve more people as I progress.
c) That the number of frameworks used or the number of standards adhered to correlates to how easy it is to contribute. I'm confident that whatever I make, other people will be able to easily contribute.
d) That you need to be a flying ninja turtle with 12 arms to possibly pull something like this off (I don't have 12 arms). I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I can't do this, but I'm confident that I have many of the skills I need already, and am able to learn the rest along the way.

Keep the feedback coming; hopefully we can work together on this project someday

[galacticfear]

If you do manage to complete it, I will at least give it a try rather than dismissing it like others seems to, I think it is worth a shot. If nothing is done FA will die in the next few years I am pretty sure, and while this has a chance of causing a "split" it could also have a chance to save the eventual decline of this game, so I think it is worth a shot.